At 62, Julian Lennon broke decades of silence with five devastating words — “I utterly hated her.” The confession landed like thunder, echoing through the halls of music history.
The “her” was Yoko Ono, the woman who reshaped his father’s world and, in doing so, fractured his own. Behind those words lay a childhood shadowed by fame, betrayal, and a longing that no spotlight could ever warm.
💬 “People saw the legend,” Julian once said, “but I saw the father who never came home.” The words cut through myth and melody alike. While the world sang Imagine, Julian imagined only absence — empty rooms, unanswered letters, and a mother’s quiet tears. He watched from afar as the man who wrote about peace built a new life without him. Years of silence hardened into anger; grief became armor.
For Julian, every Beatle song was both blessing and wound. The world’s adoration of John Lennon was a mirror he could barely look into. To millions, John was the prophet of love; to his son, he was a memory that never knocked on the door. In interviews, Julian has spoken of the strange duality — being forever connected to a man he barely knew, and to a woman he once could not forgive.
But time — relentless, healing, merciful — has a way of softening the edges. The bitterness that once defined Julian’s view of Yoko Ono and his father’s legacy has slowly faded into understanding. In recent years, he has spoken with quiet grace about acceptance, about learning to separate myth from man. He no longer runs from the Lennon name; he carries it with cautious pride.
Music, in the end, became the language that bridged what words could not. Through his own songs — fragile, reflective, searching — Julian has found a voice that is entirely his own. And within that voice is a trace of peace, the kind his father sang of but never fully lived.
Today, Julian carries his father’s name not as a curse, but as a lesson — that love, however imperfect, can still become music. That forgiveness does not always need to be spoken aloud. And sometimes, the loudest kind of forgiveness is silence.